EDITORIAL: Fiscal cliff hangs over mount of hysteria

With the election over, the wags in Washington immediately began warbling about the Next Massive Crisis Facing The United States - the so-called "fiscal cliff." It's a moniker designed to induce panic: "Something must be done immediately or America will go over the fiscal cliff!"

What is the fiscal cliff, exactly? Simply put, it's a deadline when certain laws expire and others will begin to take effect. Getting the most attention are the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and implementation of budget sequesterization -- a series of automatic spending cuts in social and defense programs, phased in over 10 years, that resulted from the 2011 failure of a Congressional "super committee" to come up with a fiscal fix.

The total cost of the cliff, over 10 years, is $7 trillion in tax increases and spending cuts. That would be the biggest cut to the deficit as a percentage of the economy since 1969.

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One might think deficit hawks would be buoyed by the news. Some are. But many are not because economists warn such a dramatic automatic shift in federal spending would throw the economy into a new recession even as it slowly recovers from the last one.

What to do? Well, President Obama has proposed -- and campaigned for the last year on -- a "balanced approach" of spending cuts and tax increases. He would preserve the Bush tax cuts for the middle class while letting them "sunset" on the top 2 percent of income earners. And he would make as-yet unspecified cuts in defense and social safety net programs, including the granddaddy of them all -- Medicare.

Republicans have another prescription. They think the nation's fiscal woes can be mostly addressed by cutting spending, and mostly on social programs. For some reason they want to include Social Security in that mix, even though it is not a part of the federal budget and thus has no effect on the deficit. As far as revenue goes, they're adamant that the Bush tax cuts be preserved for the richest of the rich (aka "the job creators," though they haven't been creating too many jobs lately) and are open to closing unspecified loopholes and deductions in the tax code. Mentioned frequently are doing away with the home-mortgage deduction or taxing employee-provided health insurance. Oh, and they want to scrap the president's signature legislative achievement from his first term, the Affordable Care Act, which according to government budget experts actually will cut the deficit, not add to it.

Some Republicans are making a big show of moving away from a "no new taxes, ever" pledge they made to a far-right activist, Grover Norquist, who leads a group called Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist is a bully who threatens disloyal GOPsters with primary fights if they fail to obey his edicts. Our own U.S. Rep. Patrick Meehan, R-7 of Upper Darby, signed the Norquist pledge. While some are throwing Grover over the fiscal cliff, Meehan is treading more carefully, saying he's open to new revenue -- but only through tax reform and closing those magical loopholes.

It doesn't sound promising, does it? On Thursday the White House offered a preliminary plan to the Republicans, only to have them walk away in disgust. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, however, indicated that the process is just beginning.

And he's right. Deep down, Republicans know they have to bargain in good faith this time. If they don't, and no deal is struck, as of January the Bush tax cuts expire for everybody and all the spending cuts begin to kick in. Who will be blamed?

President Obama holds all the cards this time. All he needs to do is to stick by his game and insist on implementing the plans he outlined in a long re-election campaign. After all, he won that contest. All the polls show the vast majority of Americans agree with his positions on taxes and spending.

While the GOP went through that campaign disparaging objective reality and science and math, there's once force of nature they cannot deny. And that's gravity, or the feeling one gets while plunging toward those rocks at the bottom of that cliff.

Elections really do have consequences, and the sooner everyone in Washington accepts that empirical fact the better off we'll all be.